Back when it was YUI-EXT the framework was immediately impressive because of the level of detail on the UI and look & feel. You could see that Jack wasn’t just thowing out code willy nilly. He was architecting a good looking overarching framework. It was consistent. It had nice touches. It just looked good!

A common theme for the Ext framework is building rich web applications that can barely be distinguished from true desktop applications. Everything from the look and feel of a control to smooth transitions in DnD are considered when building out the controls. The Web desktop is a culmination of this effort and demonstrates how the use of standards based technologies such as JavaScript, CSS & DOM can be leveraged to build a desktop like experience within the context of a browser. Notice in the screenshot that modeless windows are being used within an MDI (Multiple Document Interface) paradigm to display data to the user.

Jack and his team are doing a great job. I’ve been a big fan since the early days and I think it’s one of the cleanest frameworks around. However, the more features they add to ext the more resources (read: images, css) we will have to make to take advantage of the framework!

I, for one, doesn’t want a site that looks like every other extjs site around… and neither does my employer. :)

I love Ext, it is really well thought out, but it is a no-compromise all-or-nothing JS toolkit – meaning, nearly all of the framework’s components are created at runtime (there is minimal support for so-called “progressive enhancement” of existing HTML), and the framework often introduce many levels of s into your DOM to accomplish its magic (take a look at what an Ext Grid renders to w/ Firebug to see what I mean – it is a far cry from anything resembling a ).

Translation: it can be pretty slow if you’re not careful and/or are not running on a pretty new machine.

Comment by Ray — September 7, 2007

With such a huge amount of high quality components, I’d recommend to write a book about Ext :-)

Any chance for a declarative widget definition, with custom tags or XML? For example like in DojoÂ´s Dijit?

Comment by Thomas Holzer — September 7, 2007

@Jack Slocum
I am not so sure I would agree with your “we’re friendly folks” comment. I think you are very friendly, but one of the changes from yui-ext to ext has been the addition of partners and others on the forums who too often answer questions with a RTFM or search the forum when they could have just have easily answered the question.

I thought ext “extend” dom model,providing component services and new component model layered on top of dom as is…

maybe,it simply not possible to achive such level of quality with that level of flexibility.Anyway,I believe Ext is best UI library.
Personally,I really like IE’s behavior(DHTML and element) concept:-)

Comment by Andrey Skvortsov — September 7, 2007

@Jesse, one of Ext’s goals is to provide a complete web _application_ development framework. Part of apps, especially business apps, is trees, windows, etc. Name a major framework that doesn’t have a tree component?! BTW, the desktop itself is not a component of the library, just an example of how components can be combined (fairly easily) to create complex, attractive UIs.

@Ray, Ext provides support for progressive enhancement in the vast majority of its widgets. Not sure what you are basing your statement on. Many of the example pages use JS-generated components out of convenience, but you should not take the examples as the definitive statement on what the library is capable of.

Brian,I believe Ray means ability to describe some kind of Ext’s layout in murkup/HTML language not javascript.Something like applyTo(element)/readFromMarkup() but more generic and implicit,hence extension of existent DOM object model generated from markup,not creating new/parallel one in javascript.

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